Over on his blog, Prof Turley was sufficiently disgusted by this that he has devoted two posts to eviscerating it in his usual professorial fashion, here and here. I encourage you to read both, though this is another one of those incidents where if it has to be explained to you what’s wrong, you probably are beyond help anyway. Still, Turley’s brief is impressive, and Ethics Alarms will just add a few (well, may be more than a few) points:
- A really stupid tweet is typical of Swalwell; this one isn’t even his worst. In 2018, the same year he had the gall to announce he was running for President, Swalwell tweeted that any effort by gun owners to oppose gun confiscation by the federal government would be met with nuclear bombs. In another tweet, he wrote sarcastically, “It’s not like separation of church & state is in the Bill of Rights or anything…” This year, he tweeted, “The Republicans won’t stop with banning abortion. They want to ban interracial marriage.”
- When I wrote last week about how there were so many unethical people running for office in 2022 that I couldn’t possibly narrow the list of the most unethical down to a mere dozen as I have in the past, I forgot to mention Swalwell. This the only member of Congress who somehow managed to have a sexual affair with a Chinese spy (in 2015, before he was elected to the House). Nonetheless, he was re-elected in his California district by a landslide. What Swalwell misses in all aspects of life and logic cannot be catalogued without devoting volumes to the task.
- It’s astounding that anyone, even Democrats, would dare to evoke “experts” after the still unfolding pandemic fiasco and the near total failure of health “experts” to give competent advice.
- As Turley also notes, the analogy matching teachers to doctors is absurd, though the professor is nicer about it than I am. Teachers aren’t “experts,” they aren’t professionals in the classic sense, and, to be cruelly blunt, like journalists they are nor recruited from among the best and brightest. There is no regulation of the teaching craft, just bars to entry. Professionals—those who devote themselves to the public good at personal sacrifice, also don’t have unions, which by nature place the welfare of their members above the public’s interests…and no union has done this more flagrantly than the teachers’ union. The lawyer-client analogy is equally foolish. Lawyers are necessary because the have special training in laws and procedure. Children need to learn about how to navigate life, and parents have as much expertise in that subject as teachers.
- Parents have been the primary teachers of their offspring, and successful ones, for eons. Comparing teaching to self-surgery is…well, it’s about what one would expect of a collectivist dim bulb like Swalwell.
- Swalwell knows nothing about schools and little about parenting: his oldest child is just entering kindergarten, and probably at a private school. He has some nasty surprises waiting for him.
- The educational institution culture has rotted through, with large numbers of teachers being motivated by peer pressure, ideology, and their own flawed education. It is easy to see this, unless the observer is deliberately ignoring the condition, or wants the condition to continue.
- Parents passively and irresponsibly allowed schools to indoctrinate their children because they served as convenient child care after women finally could pursue ambitious careers. It was trust conferred by perceived necessity, not careful analysis. Now, perhaps not too late, parents are waking up and taking control.
- Some teachers are genuinely intelligent, outstanding, capable adults who do justify parental trust. The problem is that 1) far more are not (yes, it’s anecdotal , but I find it telling that the most famously dumb member of my grade school class, with the lowest SAT scores I have ever heard of to this day, became a career history teacher at the same school), 2) it is difficult to determine which, and 3) the administrators and school structures are overwhelmingly corrupt and incompetent, minimizing what even good teachers can accomplish.
- That so many teachers and school administrators accepted the ideologically advanced revisionism that slavery was the primary motivation for the United States’ creation, and have engaged in the revolutionary endeavor of teaching young children to distrust other races while deploring their own nation is strong evidence that these “experts” cannot be trusted, and that their judgment is terrible.
- Teaching and public education has lost its way, and urgently need to be reformed and re-imagined. Those with the strongest ties to the well-being of rising generations must be the main architects of any reform, and that group is parents.
Finally, when someone of Rep. Swalwell’s amply demonstrated intellectual and ethical deficits declares anything “stupid,” the Cognitive Dissonance Scale comes into play. [ADDED: This principle should also apply to any journalist or publication who resorts to Swalwell as an authority or source. For example, we have Vanity Fair writing today, “The chamber under Kevin McCarthy, and with an emboldened right flank, may ‘exist exclusively as a vessel state of MAGA nation,’Rep. Eric Swalwell tells Vanity Fair.” ]
Ethics Dunce? Incompetent Elected Official? Unethical Tweet? Unethical Quote? Bad analogies? The Great Stupid exemplified? All these and more apply to Swalwell’s outburst. And this man is a lawmaker. Re-elected by a landslide.
It’s so depressing.
Ethics Alarms 
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Cal.) saying something like “Please tell me what I’m missing here” is a rhetorical fishing question. From Swalwell’s point of view he’s not missing a thing, he’s projecting that those he opposes are missing something. Swalwell has shown us repeatedly that he’s going to toe the progressive line and attack anyone that opposes it with anything his pea brain can muster, even if it’s absurd on its face, and the ignorant progressive sheeple will swallow it hook, line and sinker. Swalwell is basically a political hack trying to give the Democratic Party sheeple soundbites and incite the opposition to see if they can be caught in some sort of “gotcha”.
That’s fair.
He’s also an asshole.
Jack Marshall wrote, “He’s also an asshole.”
I think he’s also an internet troll.
Swalwell, it seems to me, is cut from the same bolt of cloth as Beto O’Rourke: a good-lookin’ dude with a gift for gab and a near-total vacuum between his ears. The only difference that I can see is that Texans appear to be more skeptical, on the whole, than Californians.
Excellent comp.
Harking back to your post on Fetterman’s looks, it’s not difficult to imagine that perhaps Swalwell has skated through life on his “pretty boy” looks, rather than his intellect.
Arrrgh, “to your”, not ” tryout”.
Fixed.
Is there any doubt?
He looks like Greg Marmalard to me.
I KNEW the model for Greg Marmalard!
Yikes! Did he survive Vietnam?
Brief explanation: a freind of mine at Harvard was the most conservative member of the class. He was roundly hated and reviled, mostly because he argued pro-Nixon, pro-Vietnam positions with data and real arguments rather than emotion and talking points, but also because he was great looking, preppie among preppies, tall, blond and handsome. The Harvard Lampoon types knew him well, and Doug Kenney especially, who was the main writer of Animal House. My friend’s first name was Greg (as in Marmalard) and his last name was very, very similar to “Niedermie,” Doug). He went to work for the Nixon White House after graduation. He was (and is), in fact, a very kind, generous, good and brave man, and for reasons I can’t go into here, I owe him a lot for helping me out at a very difficult time.
Good for him. Anybody who doesn’t just knee jerk dismiss the U.S.’s effort to save the South Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh is fine by me.
Arthur in Maine wrote, “Swalwell, it seems to me, is cut from the same bolt of cloth as Beto O’Rourke: a good-lookin’ dude with a gift for gab and a near-total vacuum between his ears.”
What your describing is a hollow shell airhead.
I think Swalwell could be the poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Again, I taught seventh grade for a year among nuns and competent teachers, and then high school for a year and a half. A high school teacher’s lounge should be added as an additional ring of Dante’s Inferno. It was fun and satisfying while in the classroom with the kids, but other faculty were not really trying very hard. Many of the parents were wonderful and supportive, but the problem parents were insufferable. They and the low pay drove me to law school. Plus, I wasn’t one of those special teachers that can stay fresh and inspiring year in and year out.
“The lawyer-client analogy is equally foolish. Lawyers are necessary because the have special training in laws and procedure. Children need to learn about how to navigate life, and parents have as much expertise in that subject as teachers.”
Swalwell isn’t correct even if you squint really hard, tilt your head and read it in the best possible light. …. If we’re going to talk about “expertise”, then that teachers are (ostensibly) experts in teaching methods, not necessarily the subject matter, and in no way shape or form in developing curricula or determining learning priorities.
But more than this… This deference to expertise is entirely subjective. Democrats have crafted entire narrative arcs around the idea that pain is qualia, that experts are not expert – That no one is better able to diagnose what’s wrong than the person directly effected. Perhaps they have expertise in their pain, but to an extent, the deference to expertise is correct: If you have a headache, no one knows better than you that the headache exists. But how do you compare it in severity to anything other than your own experience? Is it a stress headache? Blood pressure? Are you having a stroke? Despite your expertise in diagnosing that a problem exists, the person experiencing the issue almost definitionally isn’t the right person to make the actual diagnosis or treatment plans.
And yet… these narratives persist…. Men should have no opinion on abortion. White people should have no opinion on reparations. Employers should have no say on what health insurance they provide. On and on, the steady drumbeat of progressives insisting that the qualia of their pain should override the expertise of people based on nothing but their immutable characteristics. And we’re supposed to believe that they’re the party of science?
The people saying shit like this Do. Not. Care. They have no standards. They have no principles. They will say whatever they think will lead them to getting their way in the power grab du jour they are involved in, because they are entirely sociopathic in their pursuit of power. This shouldn’t be engaged with, it should be dragged kicking and screaming into the disinfecting light of day and ridiculed for the batshittery it is.
Just had a fairly lengthy email discussion with a woman friend from college. I’d asked her to explain the rabid enthusiasm so many women seem to have for abortion, verging on a blood lust. Essentially, I got the “it’s a woman thing and men don’t get it and can’t tell me [women} what to do.” It is amazing. My body my choice. “It’s just a clump of cells until it finally kicks after a few months, and a woman can tell.” This is a woman who “followed the science” to the ridiculous extent she left a parcel post package from me out in the utility room for a week to sterilize it from possible Covid contamination. Her views on abortion are pre-Christian and almost pre-historic. Women are in fact the arbiters of biology, when it comes to abortion. Forget the science. It’s 12,00 B.C. Bizarre.
I don’t think it’s bizarre… I actually think it’s very American.
Americans do not like being told not to do things. You have a culture built around the idea of “Oh yeah, watch me!” And it’s never been anchored to whether the behavior is good or not, I assume that a large contingent of the pro-abortion narrative, the “shout your abortion” types, are just exhibiting the epitome of American contrariness.
Bingo. You’ll recall that I have several times referenced one of my favorite American moments, in a snap TV interview with a “man on the street” after Jimmy Carter told Americans to lower their thermostats to conserve energy during a (phony) oil shortage. I don’t recall the man’s exact words, but his response to the query about how he would respond to the President’s plea, he said in essence, “I’m going to RAISE my thermostat. Who the hell is Carter to tell me how warm my house should be?” I loved it then, and I love it more now. Our secret weapon against the totalitarians: contrariness.
If Swallwell’s comment is true, why is he in Congress? He is no expert in anything. Does he realize that he just indicted himself? If he tries to refute the idea that he is not an expert at governing, I will just say that he is trafficking in misinformation without any facts.
Ironically, Swalwell’s Twitter icon is a pic of him holding an infant child. How dare he imply a parental duty to that child! (I assume the child is his. Could be his and Fang-Fang’s, for all I know, or not his at all if his wife has behaved similarly to him. Maybe he should do a DNA check.) He includes tweets showing him engaged in “enriching” experiences with his (again, I assume) young daughter. He should get a professional hireling to do those things.
Holy Cow! He looks just like Michael playing Anthony DiNozzo, Jr.
Weatherly. Who, I think, is a pretty darned good actor, or at least he has the DiNozzo, Jr. character well in hand.
Unfortunately, “Bull” is so annoying that I can’t watch him any more. The there is that sexual harassment scandal…
Haven’t seen “Bull.” I guess I’m partial to him insofar as our son looks a heck of a lot like him.
Uh, but I AM in charge of my surgery as a patient. The doctor doesn’t get to decide they want to operate on me and do whatever they want. It is MY decision. If I am a client, I am in charge of my own case. The lawyer gives advice and helps, but the lawyer doesn’t get to dictate what I have to do. I have the right to disregard an attorney’s advice and seek another opinion, as I do of a physician. It is the above points that make Swallwell’s statement especially stupid.
Now, you can nitpick the argument above and say that he said ‘surgery’ and not medical treatment and he said ‘trial’ and not your case, but Tim Scott didn’t say that he was putting each set of parents in charge of the entire school. Scott said he was putting the parent in charge of THEIR child’s education. In the same way I am in charge of my medical decisions and the decisions regarding my part of a trial. The way I read it, Swallwell objects to all three of those and instead insists that I am forced to do what teachers, medical professionals, and lawyers decide I have to do.
I’m sure that the honorable representative from California is aware that his state does allow patients to control their own surgeries. All one has to do is tell a surgeon “cut off my dick, I’m a woman now” or “lop off my breasts I am a man now” Not onlyis the surgeon required by law to do so, but he will be prosecuted if he refuses. Added to that the state will pay for this patient contolled of their own surgery.
Also, has not the legally trained representative from California ever heard of the right of the individual to defend himself pro se before the judiciary?
No, but he went to the “Draw Beanie!” school of law. Actually, some self-represented clients do quite well.